Discussions

General

On January 29th Johannes Schindelin, alias Dscho, announced Shawn’s
death on the mailing list. He had learned about it from
a tweet by Chris DiBona.

Chris’ post after telling that “Shawn Pearce, author and committer
and/or founder of Git, Jgit, libgit and Gerrit has died, stricken by
an aggressive cancer” points to a
“Shawn Pearce Memorial Fund” on gofundme,
but mostly asks people to join him in missing Shawn.

On the Git mailing list, following Dscho’s email, as can be expected
in this kind of circumstances, people expressed a lot of emotions,
like sadness, shock, sorrow and gratefulness. Some outlined how
important and significant his contributions were. Then a small thread
started about making “some sort of tribute to Shawn at the upcoming
developer meeting in Barcelona”. Even if it is not clear from the
thread what kind of tribute will be made, developers were supportive
of the idea, and something will very likely happen around the
upcoming Git Merge 2018 and associated Contributor Summit
on March 7-8 in Barcelona.

Just before the closing talk of FOSDEM 2018, “the world largest
conference of its kind”, on February 4th in Brussels, a big round of
applause was given to Shawn.